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Posts from the ‘Noémie Solomon’ Category

Oct 27

Gustavia

Gurur Ertem & Noémie Solomon

İki ses ve iki beden aracılığıyla anlatılan Gustavia adındaki bu gizemli kadın kim? Gülüyor mu ağlıyor mu? Yoksa kadınlık, ölüm, tiyatro, sanat ve sanatçının toplumdaki konumu gibi çok ciddi konuları alaya mı alıyor? Gustavia farklı sanatsal mecralardan gelen fakat performans sanatının geleceğine dair ortak kaygılar güden iki olağanüstü sanatçıyı biraraya getiriyor.

Mathilde Monnier ve La Ribot’un ortak yapıtı olan bu performans, klasik burleskin birtakım kod ve tekniklerinden faydalanıyor: Burleskin sinemada (Peter Sellers, Tati, Marx Kardeşler, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Nanni Moretti), tiyatro, performans sanatı (Leo Bassi, Anna ve Bernard Blume) ve plastik sanatlardaki (Bruce Nauman…) birtakım unsurlarını bir çeşit “beden burleskine” dönüştürerek dansta gizli olan komik unsuru ortaya çıkarmayı hedefliyorlar.

Noémie Solomon Mathilde Monnier ile Bimeras Kültür Vakfı’nın düzenlediği iDANS kapsamında 27/28 Ekim 2009 tarihinde sahnelenecek Gustavia adlı performans üzerine söyleşti.

Oct 27

Gustavia

Interview by Noémie Solomon

Who is this mysterious woman called Gustavia? Is she laughing or crying? Or is she just being cynical on inexhaustible topics such as womanhood, death, theater, the arts and the artist’s position in society? Gustavia brings together two extraordinary choreographers of different artistic trajectories who share similar concerns regarding the future of performance art.It is a performance that draws on traditional burlesque by appropriating inventively some of its characteristic codes and techniques. Elements of burlesque which run through film (Peter Sellers, Tati, Marx Brothers, Keaton, Chaplin, Nanni Moretti…), theater, performance art (Leo Bassi, Anna and Bernard Blume…) as well as the visual arts (Bruce Nauman…), are transformed into a kind of “body-burlesque” which is rooted in squandered energy, repetition and accident. While humor is conspicuous in burlesque it is hidden in dance, and this is precisely what the two choreographers aim to extract.Gustavia will be performed on 27/28.10.2009 at iDANS International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance organized by Bimeras Cultural Foundation. Noémie  Solomon interviewed Mathilde Monnier about Gustavia and her collaboration with La Ribot.

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Oct 25

Uzak…: Tarihsel Tanıklıklardan Örülen bir “Otoportre” / Loin…: An auto-portrait Woven with Testimonies

Rachid Ouramdane, Noémie Solomon ile söyleşti

N.S: Bu koreografik proje Vietnam ve Kamboçya’ya yaptığınız yolculuklarla şekillendi ve dramaturjisi Cezayir, Fransa ve Viyetnam gibi ülkelere yayılıyor. Bu eseri Avrupa’nın sınırlarında yer alan İstanbul’da sahnelemenin anlamı nedir sizin için? Bu yapıt, üzerine kurulduğu kültürler ve bölgeleri nasıl yansıtıyor?

R.O: Son dönemlerde “bir ‘yabancı’ olarak kendimizi nasıl inşa ediyoruz” sorusuyla ilgilenmeye başladım. Kendi seçimlerinden dolayı, ya da mecbur kaldıkları için, ya da ailelerinden devraldıkları için sürgünde yaşayan insanlara odaklandım. Kimliklerini kültürel bir karışım üzerinden inşa eden insanlarla mülakatlar gerçekleştirerek dünya üzerinde sınırlar çizen politikaları sorgulamak istedim. Read more

Oct 25

Loin…: An auto-portrait Woven with Testimonies

Noémie Solomon interviews Rachid Ouramdane

French artist Rachid Ouramdane’s solo which will be presented on October 24th connects all three themes of iDANS Festivals so far. Loin…(Far…) is a multi-media performance which explores the conflicts between identity and experience of foreignness, tracing a series of autobiographic, poetic and choreographic journeys through Algeria, Cambodia and Vietnam; and through his father’s diaries during his military service in Indochina. It is a performance which exposes the continuity of emotions across the figures of the colonizer and the colonized as ambiguous positions in an endless game of mirrors.Noémie Solomon interviewed the artist about the choreographic journey of and the stakes involved in Loin…

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Oct 22

La Ribot – Laughing Hole

Interview by Noémie Solomon

In the throes of an eccentric laughter often indistinguishable with crying, the artists physically and symbolically carry the burden of the words they gradually reveal. Commands, headlines, sound-bites, slogans and confessions overlap and involve us in a game of shifting meanings in eclectic forms. Are we in a detention camp? Or are we part of a political demonstration? Or is this a battlefield?

In this intense performance, La Ribot merges the meanings fixed in images and words with those created by the position of the spectators. This work demonstrates how the terms “performance” and “exhibition” once marking the boundary between dance and visual arts have now in fact merged in performative art practice. The audience is free to come and go at any point throughout this project which lasts between 4-6 hours, participating in the making of temporary images and meanings as the performance unfolds.

A dancer by training, choreographer and visual artist, Maria Ribot has contributed to the development of contemporary dance in Spain since the mid-80s. In 1991, under the name of La Ribot, she took her work along new paths by creating scenic works at the moving intersection of live art, performance and video. Humor and eccentricity are the distinctive features of her work, which covers a broad artistic field. Noémie Solomon interviews the artist about her collaboration with Mathilde Monnier in Gustavia and her durational performance installation Laughing Hole.

N.S: In the current edition of the iDANS festival, you are performing Gustavia, a piece created with Mathilde Monnier, and Laughing Hole. Can you say a few words about the differences and similarities of both projects?

L.R: Both works Gustavia and Laughing Hole are really strong in terms of representation, with completely different dispositive. Gustavia is more theatrical and Laughing Hole closer to performance art, but even if Laughing Hole sounds very real, we are playing a role of “real laugh,” in a similar way that in Gustavia where we are acting a role. Both works are apparently opposites, but they are not that much different. Black in Gustavia, white and colors in Laughing Hole.

By its specific form, content and duration, Laughing Hole could be located between visual art and performance art, like most of your work, in a highly innovative and thoughtful fashion. Why choose to operate at the intersections of these art forms? What do you think in your work functions best when located at these frontiers; what are the risks or vulnerabilities of such locations?

I don’t always choose to operate in one place or another, it depends where I can work and in which context. Or what idea I have or who is asking me what. If I have to do a piece for Art-unlimited, at the Basel Art Fair, which was the case forLaughing Hole, I cannot think in the same way as when I am working with Mathilde Monnier in a theatre… I have the capacity to understand different contexts or disciplines and I work with this vision. I am not interdisciplinary: I am just versatile. The risk is to be distracted, that is why I try to investigate along the same line.

Throughout the piece, laughing comes to destabilize, intensify and reorganize usual meanings, or our general understanding of language. Could you say a few words about your own practice of laughing? Would you describe it as a physical, emotional, critical act? How do you choreograph such an extreme, durational and intense gesture?

There is an important amount of will power; we have to believe that it is possible and we get deeply into. We use all techniques that we know: theatrical techniques, dance techniques, yoga techniques, breathing techniques, concentration techniques and a lot of mental power, along with a strong sense of humor. Because it not a funny piece, just sometimes; it is a hard and quite disturbing piece, extremely emotional and difficult technically.
(18.09.09)

La Ribot/Laughing Hole
29.10.09
garajistanbul 16:00-20:00

May 29

Speaking of Time

Noémie Solomon

Speaking Dance
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion

Do these two dancers share the same time, or do they hold to their own time? What are the benefits of sharing time, and what are the benefits of ignoring each other’s time?
-Jonathan Burrows

Sitting next to each other, the two dancers begin as suddenly as deliberately. “Right. Left. Right. Left. Right.Left.RightLeftRightLeft…” The spoken words alternate, overlap, brush against each other; they create subtle and complex tempos, speeds and rhythms. “Right Left Right Left Right Left Right Stop.” In a constant play with each other’s time, and with that of the audience, the synchronized utterances arise in distinct yet ever shifting patterns, creating instances of singular melodies, of joyous dissonance, of cadenced silences.

Speaking Dance (2006) is the third opus marking a fruitful collaboration in which Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion astutely explore through a series of intimate duets the intersections between dance and music, composition and temporality. Their thoughtful and humorous meditations operate at the frontier between the virtual and the actual; perception and the imaginary. If the first two pieces — Both Sitting Duet (2002) and Quiet Dance (2005) — dealt mostly with the dancing gesture and systems of movement, Speaking Dance is primarily concerned with the verbal gesture. Throughout the piece, the two performers create a series of minute and complex rhythms with the use of banal words and speech acts. Proposing singular modalities of composition and of attitudes towards time, Burrows and Fargion then astutely work to modify, vary and recompose them, playing incessantly with the interaction and perception of time. The dance thus speaks to the spectator’s expectations, expanding a possible range of responses. These experimentations not only blur the musical and choreographic score, but explore temporal lapses that activate new perceptive mechanisms and leaps into the imaginary. As it take hold of speeds, ruptures and slowness, this meticulous spectacle of choreographed polyphony shapes an accumulation of meanings, a dispersion of language.

Embodying a thoughtful balance between rigor and casualness, banality and virtuosity, the performance shapes itself through a series of expressive acts. Filled with “linguistic gesticulations,” the choreography radically refigures what dance can be; its structure, essence and perhaps most importantly its mode of interaction with music. Rhythm, which emerges as the proportion of motion, re-imagines the manifold relations between dance and music. Opening possibilities for multiples ways of interacting, for an equal and fruitful dialogue, this play of rhythm across words and movements counters our assumption of the flow of time. Rhythm arises not as a formal alternating, but rather as an alternative organization of the dancing subject. What Speaking Dance thus proposes is a performative dancing body figuring itself via rhythmic gestures. Rhythm here speaks of dance as intimacy, friendship, temporality or absurdity; of dance as joyous mode of arrhythmia.